Ge's Digital Revolution Redefining The E In Ge Analysis

Within 18 months of introducing the e-business initiative, Internet Week named GE the ~{!0~}Internet Company of the Year.~{!1~} How was GE to drive this ambitious company-wide program throughout its complex and diverse organizations so quickly and effectively?

GE is a huge company, with 3 dozen of business areas, over 300 thousand employees and annual sales revenue as high as 129 billion in the year of 2000. It was the "social architecture" (culture and values) and "operating systems" (systems and processes) helped this complex and diverse organization to drive through changes quickly and effectively that have it named Internet Week's top e-business of 2000. These deeply rooted strengths did not only contribute to the process in introducing the e-business initiative, but also assisted GE in evolving into a typical successful learning organization.

GE~{!/~}s ~{!0~}social architecture~{!1~} is recognized as the platform from which Jack Welch launched the company~{!/~}s transformation. Firstly, Welch himself is a man loves embracing new technology. He started to use computer in his 50s and even found someone under 30 to teach him internet. As early as 1989, Welch articulated organization culture as ~{!0~}one that characterized by speed, simplicity, and self-confidence~{!1~}. In the early 1990, Welch~{!/~}s vision was to create a competitive advantage out of GE~{!/~}s diversity by making the company ~{!0~}a vast laboratory whose principal product is new ideas that are spread rapidly throughout the company~{!1~}. GE values the process of sharing insights, knowledge and mental models between internal departments but also with external partners. Later on, many of the embedded beliefs become an formal set of values (as stated in Exhibit 2) such as ~{!0~}insist on excellence and are intolerant of bureaucracy~{!-~}create an environment of stretch, excitement, informality and trust~{!-~}...